Ugo Cei’s Weblog
Just arrived safely in Boston for the 2007 XML Conference, which starts Monday, so I have time to take part in the Christmas shopping madness before then.
First impression: Marriott Copley Place hotel sucks. Room Internet access is for-pay, wired only and awfully slow. Couldn’t even connect to any of the open WiFi networks listed, for some reason.
It’s also as cold as hell here, like -1°C at 3PM, but I expected it so I was prepared.
… and his name is Mohammed.
You can call him Jesus, if you like, it’s just the same old shit.
Sonny Perdue to God: “I said G-E-O-R-G-I-A, not Bangladesh.”
Obviously God is American: most Americans would not be able to place Bangladesh on a map. Well, maybe not even Georgia ;).
I guess some developer at alitalia.com forgot to remove a statement from one of the website’s scripts:
I noticed because I have Firebug installed and it popped up the Javascript debugger window while loading the home page.
Mary Jo Foley: “If you’re Microsoft — especially a member of the Vista team — there’s no way you can help but gloat. Very few Softies or their loyal followers are gloating publicly. But there’s no way they aren’t enjoying this turning of the tables.”
Via an article on corriere.it, I just learned of the existence of Bidplaza. If you do not read Italian, don’t worry, it’s exactly the same mechanism as limbo unique, except for the cost. Basically, the player who makes the lowest unique offer for an item wins.
While I wasn’t able to determine how much placing a bid on a limbo unique item costs, it’s very clear from Bidplaza’s website that each bid will set you back 2€ (that’s almost USD 3 nowadays).
Since online forums in Italy are ablaze with questions about Bidplaza, with people wondering whether it’s a scam or a legitimate business, I figured I could do some research about it. Here are my conclusions. Take them with a grain of salt and remember that I am not a lawyer, I an not in any way involved in Bidplaza, nor I have any other knowledge beside what can be gleaned from the Web.
What is the business model?
The business model is very clear, so people should stop wondering how they can give away cameras, computers and cars for such low prices. If they put up an iPod Touch 16GB (list price 399€) for bidding and 200 people bid on it, the site will have made a 1€ profit. If 400 people bid, they will have made a 100% profit on the sale. Of course, this implies that they will get a high enough number of bidders, but if they have some capital they can afford losing some money at the start while the media-driven buzz heats up and the site becomes sufficiently popular.
Is this an auction site?
This is not an auction in any way. It’s more akin to a lottery, as guessing the lowest possible amount that no one else will bid on is more a matter of luck than anything else. I’m not sure there can’t be a playing strategy that gives a better change of winning, but if there is it isn’t obvious and the odds must be only marginally better than a strategy based on picking values at random. If it’s a lottery indeed, is it legal according to Italian law? I have no idea, I’m not a lawyer.
Who is behind Bidplaza?
The bidplaza.it domain is registered by a company named Es Media Srl, based in Segrate (MI). They do not seem to have a website, but if the company is real, anyone could go to the Chamber of Commerce in Milan and ask for information about it. However, their CEO Semih Sadi has a profile on LinkedIn and he’s listed as the admin contact for the domain.
The only entry mentioning Bidplaza on LinkedIn is for Sadok Kohen. Sadok has a blog and if he keeps an eye on his incoming links and notices this one, he is welcome to visit and leave a comment.
By the way, where do these guys come from, since their names are obviously not of Italian origin?
Turns out they’re apparently Turkish. Just to be clear, this is a fact I have no problems with.
Who are all those smiling Scandinavians driving Porsches and Ferraris show on the website?
I have no idea. Various articles on the Italian Web hint at Bidplaza being an emanation of some nordic entity, but I could find no trace of this. One article references bidplaza.co.uk but that website is just a page with an address and some phone numbers. The bidplaza.com domain is registered to the same people who registered bidplaza.it and indeed www.bidplaza.com redirects to the Italian version.
My educated guess is that their business just started, but they wanted to show some history to make it look more legitimate. Unfortunately, you just can’t hide anything in the era of Google and it’s not true that on the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. If you’re a dog, somebody will find out sooner or later and this kind of strategy risks backfiring. Of course it’s entirely possible that those Swedes are real and I welcome Sadok or Sami or any other representative from the company to come here and tell us more about them.
Would you play on Bidplaza?
Matter of fact, I already did. I registered on the site and gave my mobile phone number, so I could get the 2€ bonus, which I used to place one bet. Unfortunately I bet on an amount which was not unique, so I lost. I guess that if it cost much less than 2€ per bet, I’d be tempted to try playing some more. I would feel relatively safe in doing so, since I could simply budget 10€ via PayPal and not risk anything more, but I’m not a gambler.
Update: I found where the happy Scandinavians come from: bidster.com. The graphics of bidster.com and bidplaza.it are obviously the same, so I wonder what exactly the relationship between bidster.com and bidplaza.it is. A bit more transparency would be appreciated.
Kudos to my colleagues Ugo and Sergio for releasing Scarlet:
Sourcesense is proud to announce the first beta of Scarlet, a clustering solution for Atlassian Jira bringing high-availability and scalability to the award-winning Jira issue tracker. The solution is based on Terracotta DSO, the Open Source clustering framework from Terracotta, enabling easy and trasparent scalable Java solutions.
Scarlet provides a full-fledged clustering solution for Jira, bridging an important gap when it comes to enterprise architectures based on high-availability: rated as one of the most popular requests from Jira users, clustering support makes Jira a truly distributed enterprise-class solution for organizations relying on simple yet effective scalable architectures.
Scarlet is distributed as an Open Source extension to Jira under the Mozilla Public License 1.1 and it’s available from http://confluence.atlassian.com/x/woQuBg. Jira users and developers are encouraged to dowload the extension and provide feedback: Sourcesense is committed to support and manage contributions, under a transparent and meritocratic Open Development process. Commercial support and additional services are available from http://www.sourcesense.com.
One of the interesting facts about Scarlet is the fact that it’s based on Terracotta DSO, an insanely cool distributed object system, network-attached memory, or what you call it, and Open Source to boot. Ever since I first heard about it, I was under the impression that it could be a great solution to a large class of problems, but was never able to personally verify this assumption. With Scarlet we have a great example of its validity.
What best way to spend a november Saturday than taking a trip to the Lake of Como under a beautiful sun and having lunch out in the open right by the lakeside?
If you happen to go by there, take one of the boats that leaves from Como and stops in Tavernola, Cernobbio, Moltrasio and Torno. They leave every 30 minutes from one of the main piers in Como’s central Piazza Cavour. Disembark in Torno and go eating at Hotel Belvedere, which is on the southern side of the small square where boat pier is. It’s a quite inconspicuous 1-star hotel but it’s got pretty good dishes prepared from typical lake fish, like lavarello, agone and a variety of perch. You won’t find these anywhere else but around lakes.
The beautiful colors of the autumn leaves prompted me to shoot a fair number of pictures that I’ll be sorting in the coming days and posting to this set.
For me, it’s not about whatever was good enough for the old masters is good enough for me. It’s more that I believe in order to learn what you can do, you need to explore the full effects of all the different settings you can use to make a photograph. And, in most cases at the consumer level, modern zoom lenses—while useful for their strengths—have taken away the ability to explore the wide end of the aperture range.
Fixed focal length lenses aren’t needed, except for macro or super tele. The faster f/stops of fixed lenses aren’t needed with digital’s high ISOs. Almost all lens development in the past 20 years has been focused on zooms, so as digital dawns there are few things that zooms can’t do better.
When I started shooting, I used the kind of equipment that you can see here. I craved for a zoom, but could not afford it, so I learned to zoom with my feet and with my hands, switching lenses as fast as I could.
Then I got myself one of those long-zoom, non-SLR, compact digitals. Not a bad one, actually: the lens is f/2.8 maximum all along the impressive 36-432mm (equiv.) range. Even though I often find myself taking advantage of the long end, I regret that it isn’t more like 28-336mm.
The small sensor, however, is a sucker for noise and almost completely unusable above ISO 200. I would love to be able to take hand-held pictures at night using ISO 1600 and a wide-angle, like Ken’s pictures of New York, but I can’t.
So what should one do, assuming one has got himself a decent DSLR? Crank up the ISO and enjoy the freedom to walk around and shoot hand-held at night? Or “explore the wide end of the aperture range”?. Probably both. I especially like the idea that I can get myself a Nikon D40, with the excellent 18-55mm kit lens and still use my old 50mm f/1.4 on it, even though it means manual focus and guessing at the exposure. Still, it would cost much less than I payed for my compact less than three years ago.
Extensions - .me : Montenegro ready to go live - DomainesInfo: “The local registry has just put up its new website and hopes to start registering .ME domains in the first quarter of next year.
Domaines.Info spoke to the .ME registry’s technical manager, who explained Montenegro’s plans for going live on the Internet, following the ICANN’s board decision earlier this month to delegate .ME to the country’s government.
On top of the main .ME domain, the Montenegrin namespace will have 8 secondary level domains: NET.ME, ORG.ME, CO.ME, GOV.ME, AC.ME, EDU.ME, ITS.ME and PRIV.ME.
The registry is currently setting up the technical infrastructure for .ME and hopes to launch early next year. The extension will be unrestricted and auctions may be held for the more valuable names. “
I’d love (pun intended) to buy the love.me domain when it becomes available, but if the history of Tuvalu’s TLD is any indication, it will cost millions.
(Via Lars.)
Technorati Tags: montenegro, icann, dns, domains, me.
From @monkchips.
AtomPub is now officially RFC5023:
The Atom Publishing Protocol (AtomPub) is an application-level protocol for publishing and editing Web resources. The protocol is based on HTTP transfer of Atom-formatted representations. The Atom format is documented in the Atom Syndication Format.
Technorati Tags: trevi fountain, fontana di trevi, rome.
As previously mentioned, I’ll be leaving tomorrow for Rome, as I am going to attend (and even bore the audience to death with a talk) the 6th Cocoon GetTogether.
Exactly two months from then I’ll deliver more boredom upon an unsuspecting audience at the XML 2007 Conference in Boston.
Whichever side of the pond you happen to be, you’re welcome to come see me. Bring your own choice of rotten tomatoes and other vegetables 
BBC NEWS | World | Africa | Shock at archbishop condom claim: “The head of the Catholic Church in Mozambique has told the BBC he believes some European-made condoms are infected with HIV deliberately.
Maputo Archbishop Francisco Chimoio claimed some anti-retroviral drugs were also infected ‘in order to finish quickly the African people’.”
Of course, if Pope Ratzi and his minions had any decency they would have fired the lying scumbag already, but I’m not holding my breath. They will probably do nothing or, at most, move the dickhead (the picture on the right is an actual depiction of the brand of condoms the archbishop uses) to a different diocese where he will be able to continue misleading and harming his flock.
They should also have the decency to ask Chimoio to reveal the name of the other European country that is infecting condoms with HIV. We all know the first one is the Vatican, right?
Technorati Tags: chimoio, condoms, mozambique.
Note: This is a new kind of online protest that uses blogs to spread a petition globally. To participate, just add your blog by following the instructions in this blog post.
This not an issue of partisan politics, this is an issue of basic human rights and democracy. Please help to prevent a human tragedy in Burma by adding your blog and asking others to do the same.
By passing this meme on through the blogosphere hopefully we can generate more awareness and avert a serious tragedy. As concerned world-citizens this something we bloggers can do to help.
How to participate:
1. Copy this entire post to your blog, including this special number: 1081081081234
2. After a few days, you can search Google for the number 1081081081234 to find all blogs that are participating in this protest and petition. Note: Google indexes blogs at different rates, so it could take longer for your blog to show up in the results.
3. If you know how to add tags to your blog posts, add the Technorati tag 1081081081234 to your post as well. This will make your post findable sooner in Technorati.
THE SITUATION IN BURMA AND WHY IT MATTERS TO ALL OF US
There is no press freedom in Burma and the government has started turning off the Internet and other means of communication, so it is difficult to get news out. Individuals on the ground have been sending their day-by-day reports to the BBC, and they are heartbreaking. I encourage you to read these accounts to see for yourself what is really going on in Burma. Please include this link in your own blog post.
The situation in Burma is increasingly dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of unarmed peaceful protesters, including monks and nuns, are risking their lives to march for democracy against an unpopular but well-armed military dictatorship that will stop at nothing to continue its repressive rule. While the generals in power and their families are literally dripping in gold and diamonds, the people of Burma are impoverished, deprived of basic human rights, cut off from the rest of the world, and increasingly under threat of violence.
This week the people of Burma have risen up collectively in the largest public demonstrations against the ruling Junta in decades. It’s an amazing show of bravery, decency, and democracy in action. But although these protests are peaceful, the military rulers are starting to crack down with violence. Already there have been at least several reported deaths, and hundreds of critical injuries from soldiers beating unarmed civilians to the point of death.
The actual fatalities and injuries are probably far worse, but the only news we have is coming from individuals who are sneaking reports past the authorities. Unfortunately it looks like a large-scale blood-bath may ensue — and the victims will be mostly women, children, the elderly and unarmed monks and nuns.
Contrary to what the Burmese, Chinese and Russian governments have stated, this is not merely a local internal political issue, it is an issue of global importance and it affects the global community. As concerned citizens, we cannot allow any government anywhere in the world to use its military to attack and kill peacefully demonstrating, unarmed citizens.
In this modern day and age violence against unarmed civilians is unacceptable and if it is allowed to happen, without serious consequences for the perpetrators, it creates a precedent for it to happen again somewhere else.
If we want a more peaceful world, it is up to each of us to make a personal stand on these fundamental issues whenever they arise.
Please join me in calling on the Burmese government to negotiate peacefully with its citizens, and on China to intervene to prevent further violence. And please help to raise awareness of the developing situation in Burma so that hopefully we can avert a large-scale human disaster there.
Technorati Tags: burma, myanmar, 1081081081234.
So it was with delight that I saw the review written by another of those Uppity Atheists™, none other than Richard Dawkins at The Times Online and I will do no more than promptly point you to it, since I—obviously— couldn’t have said it better.
Speaking of Dawkins, I had previously read his own The God Delusion
This is old news, and Gianugo already blogged brilliantly about it, but I didn’t want to write about it until Paolo provided me with pictures to document the event, lest people believe that it was all a hoax. But it’s true: you can be a geek and win a national decathlon title (no less than three times) and here are the pictures to prove it.
Congratulations, Paolo!
After having skipped last year’s edition, I am happy to report that this year I will attend the 2007 edition of the Cocoon GetTogether. What makes this edition special is the fact that, after five years in the cold and misty lands of Belgium first and, more recently, of the Netherlands, we will meet in beautiful, sunny Rome for a change.
Another reason why this edition is special is that it’s the first time that Sourcesense is in charge of organizing the event. In other words, we will be playing hosts and matching the hospitality that was generously provided by Outerthought and Hippo before us won’t be an easy task. Still, Italian food is on another level entirely with respect to even the best Belgian and Dutch spare ribs, so this will certainly help us gain some points.
So mark October 3rd to 5th on your calendars for three days of talks, hacking, community, open source, good food and wine. We await for you!
If you have five minutes to spare, go to this collection of 9 interactive color games and test how good your sense of color is. Even though I didn’t think much of my color sense, I managed to get them all right at the first try. So maybe the games are really easy or my color sense isn’t as bad as I thought.
